The Palin syndrome

The Palin syndrome

Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It's as if family strictures undermine family structures.

Why should this be? Citing a new book by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Rauch wonders if it could be because young people from morally traditional families have sex anyway, get pregnant and are under a lot of pressure to marry when they are too young to make mature choices. Marrying young also makes it harder for them to complete their education, which means they earn less, which means they have the kind of financial woes that often cause marital discord.

Rauch contrasts the reactions to Bristol Palin's pregnancy among red and blue Americans:

In 2008, when news emerged that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee was pregnant, traditionalists were reassured rather than outraged, because Bristol Palin followed the time-honored rules by announcing she would marry the father. They were kids, to be sure, but they would form a family and grow up together, as so many before them had done. Blue America, by contrast, was censorious. Bristol had committed the unforgivable sin of starting a family too young.

And he argues that:

Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children.

I have nothing but respect for Rauch, both as a journalist and as an exemplar of true family values. His recent Atlantic piece on caring for his dying father was incredibly moving. Full disclosure: he's also a friend.

But I wonder about his headline. First, consider the limitations of the data. A state is a very large unit, and only slightly more than half the people in it have to vote Republican for it to count as "red". The most socially conservative states are in the South, where the group with the largest problem with family breakdown—African Americans—votes solidly Democratic. So I'd want to unpack the numbers a bit more.

It may be that preaching about family values forces people into premature or shotgun weddings which then fall apart. But it seems equally plausible that this story could be, in large measure, about class. Americans in poor red states are surrounded by family breakdown, so they fear it more, and make it into a political issue. The college-educated classes, who trend blue, have low rates of divorce and single parenthood. They are also better equipped, financially at least, to cope with the consequences of family breakdown should it occur. So they don't worry about it as much, and are repelled by politicians who wax sanctimonious about it.

Although I shared notes with a friend -- his kid attends a big rich suburban red high school, with a large evangelical flavor, and mine attends a big rich suburban blue high school, with few kids who would call themselves religious. And it wasn't close, the red high school had several teen pregnancies, while my kid's school had but one.

I do know that I'd love for the "red" crowd to wax a lot less sanctimonious about pretty much everything and mind their own darn business. Sounds like it might do 'em some good to consider the log in their own eye before getting riled up by the mote in mine...

I should add that my red friend is quite tolerant of out-of-wedlock pregnancies if marriage ensues, he doesn't have any moral or practical difficulties with that. Whereas my wife would blow a gasket at my kids for being complete and utter idiots if were involved in an accidental pregnancy. I do think that there is a different mindset between wealthy red and wealthy blue on that item, yes.

Women who are educated have fewer kids. Girls who play sports in high school are less likely to have kids and drop out. Women who earn more get married later (avoiding the "shotgun weddings" in the process). Etc (sorry for not citing; Economist has run articles on these studies and they're pretty commonly cited).

Red states often (not always) have lower education levels, lower income levels for working women, and a lower % of working women. I think that just about checks every box.

I'd also avoid building some sort of philosophical thesis based on reactions to Bristol Palin, as it's very difficult to separate that from partisan identification. If it were Chelsea Clinton instead of Bristol Palin, I'd imagine the same people might react in different ways.

I think it is important to point out, Bristol Palin ended up not marrying Levi. Either Sarah Palin &co aren't concerned about socially normative conservative family values, or that particular aspect (marry the guy who knocked you up) isn't a strictly held socially normative conservative family value.

I'm speculating, here, but I think the main influence on divorce rates is religion. The religious groups with the highest divorce rate in the are Protestants, who are heavily concentrated in the South, which is mostly Republican. Catholics, who have a much lower divorce rate, are concentrated in the Northeast, and in the bigger cities, which are mostly majority Democrat. So despite the fact that many Catholics vote Republican and many Protestants vote Democrat their regional political colours are "Blue" and "Red" respectively.

Also consider the largeness of it. Uneveness in the data is somewhat evened out by the huge scope of it, the red land, taken as a whole, is red. The blue states, taken as a whole, are blue. There are oddballs in both camps, but in general they fall into their respective classes.

Statstics can be the study of generalities, not specifics, which is where I think this blog post goes wrong.

The Rauch column doesn't give any numbers, so one can't easily tell what he's doing there. For instance, if you simply look at divorce rate as the number of divorces per capita, you can be misled. If a state has lots of people who never bother to get married, such a state will necessarily have a low divorce rate.

Rauch's analysis is idiotic. First, his argument is predicated on an assumed correlation between political affiliation and divorce and birth rates (i.e. being democrat leads to lower divorce rates). This is ridiculous, and does not take into account that there are other factors at play in these states that affect divorce and birth rates, or that political voting patterns in 2 elections are largely coincidental. This is like making the following argument: 1) for Thanksgiving, a lot of turkeys are killed and eaten; 2) right after Thanksgiving, winter follows; 3) therefore, killing turkeys causes winter!

In reality, divorce rates are impacted most heavily by higher income and higher education levels. Age is also correlated with divorce rates. The higher the income level, and the higher the education level, the lower the divorce rate tends to be. Increased age also leads to lower divorce rates. The same correlations hold for childbirth as well. Of course, for those paying attention to the demographic breakdown of the past election, the wealthy and educated trended heavily towards Obama. Rauch does not specifically identify the states he refers to (except Massachusetts), but does identify them as democratic, liberal, and bicoastal -- which leads me to believe we are likely looking at traditional democratic enclaves in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. Both areas have higher education rates, and greater wealth, in comparison to more rural, less prosperous areas in the deep south and midwest.

It is also interesting to note that Rauch is reviewing work done by two LAW professors, and not work done by real sociologists. A legitimate sociological study would have carefully taken other factors into account to find out if there is truly a correlation between political affiliation and divorce/birth rates, or whether the comparison is merely coincidental because both factors happen to be correlated to other unrelated factors (like income, education, age, etc.)

I'd be surprised if the National Journal were willing to publish anything that reaches any other conclusion. They aren't exactly fond of Palin, evangelicals, conservatives, or low-income whites.

As you mention, states are unwieldy data sets. The coastal "blue" states are better-educated and higher-income, while the interior "red" states are more rural and poor. To correctly account for the effect of "family values", we must adjust for income and education. It could very well be that the family outcomes of conservative evangelicals would be even worse without embracing so-called "family values".

I think Lexington is absolutely correct that this is about class. Marriage, home-ownership, single-parenthood, and teen-pregnancy rates fall sharply on class divides. The upper classes have always understood, despite the rhetoric, that future membership in the upper-class depends on raising successful progeny, a task that is most easily achieved by raising children in a intact family in a neighborhood with a high-ranked school. The societal breakdown of poor blacks is well-documented, and the same trend is now affecting poor whites. One useful study would be to monitor the relative speed of family breakdown in different communities. Embracing "family values" may be an effective way to slow or stop this trend.

"...says the guy who can scarcely contain his urge to coerce people into eating his ideal diet and maintaining his ideal weight. Pot? Meet Kettle."

You seem a bit tender about the weight issue, _jks.

I have absolutely zero interest in coercing anybody to do anything that doesn't harm anybody but themselves. Pursue Happiness however you want, as far as I'm concerned. If you want to be a twig or a walrus is none of my damn business, knock yrself out either way. (With the caveat: so long as you pay your own way rather than saddling the country with your obesity-related medical expenses)

The obesity issue generally comes up as a hypothetical in terms of societal costs. For instance, if we're going to spend a gazillion dollars on a "War on Terror" in order to make the country safer, that money would be vastly better spent on a "War on Obesity", since obesity kills over 100,000 Americans each and every year (and growing).

In other words, it's not a moral "do what I want you to do because I'm Right and you're Wrong", per the "social conservatives", it's an economic "are we spending money to achieve our stated goals (i.e., national safety) in the appropriate way?"

I was born and raised in Mississippi and have lived in Minnesota since college, which has been for almost thirty years. I know something about blue and red states.

First, blue states were NOT censorious of Bristol Palin. In true liberal fashion everyone was careful to not judge her. The only complaints I heard were about the double standard: How would red state American reacted if Chelsea Clinton had been pregnant during the 1996 presidential campaign? What would Fox News' coverage have been like?

One reason I am a progressive Democrat is because of the contrasts I saw between my home state (which I still love) and my adopted city of Minneapolis. The Twin Cities have a lot of Scandinavians and I do wonder if that's a factor in the progressive stance of Minnesota.

Anyone who has ever listened to Southern C & W music knows that any "sin" is okay as long as you feel anguish for committing it. So, it's not surprising that young Southerners are doing what the rest of the peer group is engaging in.

The South is simply more regressive. I have relatives who would never dream of challenging their terrible working conditions, who simply suck it up and live with below-average wages but are quick to talk about Big Government, even though Big Government has made their lives better and Big Business takes advantage of them.

I could talk until I'm blue in the face, no pun intended, but some of my family would never entertain the possibility that the federal government can act as an advocate for them against the voracious appetite of Big Business.

"If it were Chelsea Clinton instead of Bristol Palin, I'd imagine the same people might react in different ways"

But high-achievement kids from blue Ivy League families like Chelsea don't get pregnant at age 17, not any more often than the Cubs win the World Series. That's the whole point of the article ... it really *couldn't* have been Chelsea.

I used to have a girlfriend from Southern Mexico which has (or at least used to about 5 yrs ago) a very traditional view of dating. Chaperones on dates etc...

Many friends ended up pregnant because they were simply unprepared when faced with an irrestible urge and the rare opportunity to be alone. This often led to an unhappy marriage and in some cases divorce.

I happen to be reading at the moment a 2004 dialogue between Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury (and probably still is, but I'm not certain on that), on religion and art, during which Williams says:

". . .one of the fallacies of religion that's not working is to suppose that somehow you can spin the wheel backwards, and go back to pure unselfconsciousness."

Irrespective of the context of that quote, my observation is that this is precisely what social conservatives are doing -- trying to roll back the clock and pretend it's possible to live in some pre-Fall Edenic state where everything is perfect, so long as one follows a certain set of precepts more or less unquestioningly.

Trouble is, I further observe, this is pretty much impossible. And it's also why social liberals seem increasingly to prefer the label "progressive" to "liberal" -- the former implying a kind of concerted reaching for general improvement (to quality of life, say) while the latter suggests a laissez faire approach to just about everything.

I admit to having thrown up the Bible-Belt divorce rates as cheap and easy arguing points, but knowing it was convenient sophistry. It is a complicated problem. But I'll probably still use it against similarly flawed arguments on the other side.

Good post, I agree. The suspicion about a book like this is that it's a flimsy way to justify doing things like abortion people have serious objections to, and may just piss people off that are on the other side of the issue who don't like how they're being described. Sounds like the authors might be true culture warriors. To challenge their theory a bit: it's not entirely fair to hit the other side in this way, since because of the "blue-state" mindset, to use the lingo here, it's very hard for "red-state" kids to understand why they're not supposed to do certain things they do anyway. You can't tell a kid wait until marriage before sex, for example, unless you can give them underlying beliefs that give a reason to do that, and that's a hard thing to convey to a kid with all the mixed messaging out there & stuff on tv and all the rest.